


On Happiness, Death, and Gay Desire

by RogueTranslator



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Canon LGBTQ Character, Canon LGBTQ Male Character, Essays, LGBTQ Character, LGBTQ Themes, M/M, Nonfiction
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-11-07
Updated: 2020-11-23
Packaged: 2021-03-09 03:21:18
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 2
Words: 1,218
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27427849
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/RogueTranslator/pseuds/RogueTranslator
Summary: I started writing out my thoughts on 15x18 and decided to share them here.Overall, I'm quite critical of the episode and the storytelling choices that got us to this point. Also, even though I'm a fan of Destiel, I care more about Castiel—especially now that he's confirmed as a canon queer character—and my stance here reflects that.ETA: Now there's a second chapter post-finale. There wasn't enough homophobia yet, apparently.
Relationships: Castiel/Dean Winchester
Kudos: 50





	1. Chapter 1

Supernatural 15x18, or how unfortunate messages can emerge from noble intentions.

Let's start with why Castiel died in terms of the narrative. It wasn't because he was in love with a man or because he came out. It was because he made a deal a long time ago to trade his life for Jack's and saw an opportunity to use that to his advantage to neutralise an otherwise impossible adversary. (Castiel was always a tactician, after all, though successive writers tended to sideline that over the years and lean heavily into the comedy stuff.)

I've seen people point to that as an argument that this wasn't an instance of Bury Your Gays. But that's a misapprehension of the trope. Queer characters being killed off—especially after they've found some sort of happiness, especially in graphic and gruesome ways—is the point. Queer characters not getting their happy ending is the point. The text doesn't have to literally have a homophobe walk in and bash them. Even in earlier eras when obscenity laws still covered homosexual content, things weren't always that ham-fisted. (Ironically, a lot of early examples of BYG were written by LGBT authors themselves, since it was the only way gay/lesbian stories could be published without being censored. The trope was established and perpetuated with the complicity of many queer creators, which is one reason to regard with skepticism arguments that point to the sexuality of modern-day creators as evidence against the trope...but I digress.)

So yes, Castiel is revealed to be non-heteronormative in more explicit terms than the show has ever gone for before, finds his happiness in admitting his love to a man, and gets killed immediately after that. This is a pretty open and shut case of the trope. There is some complexity, but the point of tropes is that even though most individual cases will have some canon-specific thing someone can point to as mitigation, the truth emerges in the aggregate (as truths often do). Watsonian arguments are not a sufficient defence; they can be raised in every case and in every case they’re the choices of writers.

"But no one gets a happy ending," some will say. "It's Supernatural!"

Well, that's just not true. The show has taken great pains to show us numerous characters who've had happy endings. Heaven obviously isn't perfect in-universe, but it's better than any of the alternatives, and a heck of a lot of characters reside there. Also, angels like Michael, Serafina, and Benjamin have been shown living out their existences on Earth in positive and affirming ways. I will point out that in all of these cases, they are partnered with a human with whom they share mutual love and trust.

But this is secondary to the question of why this is a character ending at all. After all, Dean and Sam (and Jack) are still around. Why is Castiel the only one to be gone before the season/series finales? It’s a moment that says different things for Castiel and Dean.

For Castiel, this is portrayed as an epiphany, a moment of key character growth (for which the character has to die for reasons endogenous to the writing). But it’s just as much a moment of character stagnation. There is nothing less surprising in a Castiel arc than him wanting to kill himself to save others and deriving his worth from that, nothing more predictable than Castiel being the redshirt that propels the brothers to their inevitable victory. I don’t see this instance of it as being imbued with as much transfigurative grace as Misha and Berens seem to. From what I can gather, that very grace seems to derive from him “speaking his truth”…even though that’s the basis of the bad trope here.

For Dean, this is his parallel to Charlie’s and Sam’s losses. It’s the character black moment that goes along with the plot black moment of everyone on Earth disappearing. It’s about him needing to be bucked up by another character in his moment of doubt, and we can remark on the writerly privilege accorded to the Winchester brothers in this regard by the often women, minority, and queer characters around them. It’s about the pure, selfless, total love that male protagonists routinely receive from women who are used as character motivation—Mary, Jessica, Colette—and to which we can add Castiel, a queer character. These are characters whose stories are told _about_ , not told _by_. As much as Castiel spoke for almost that entire scene, what happened there was _Dean’s story_ from a narrative perspective, and not just because he survives it and Castiel does not.

In the end, once you clear away the minutiae and sophistry, a queer character came out, confessed his feelings for his best friend, received no textual validation, and was killed minutes later in an especially lurid manner. That it was primarily about providing motivation and stakes to that other character is neatly underscored by the final scene of Dean crying. Even though we know the show’s camera can go into the Empty to examine Castiel’s point of view after one of the most momentous moments of his life, it doesn’t. Because this isn’t about his story. It’s about Dean’s.

Some people may be happy with that scene, but I wasn’t. There are a lot of false choice heuristics that people have internalised, I think, when it comes to LGBT characters, and they in part flow from the prevalence of tropes like BYG. Either he dies with Destiel ambiguous or he dies with Destiel confirmed…I mean, okay. What about if his death weren’t connected to queer desire? What about if his queer identity had been developed and explored on its own terms over a long period of time rather than as an accessory to a ship? What about if the entire welter of feelings between Dean and Castiel had been approached with sensitivity and honesty years ago, rather than the last few hours of a 15-year-long show? What about not tying queer love and desire to a plot bomb that triggers a character’s death and doom, and instead developing it in an attentive and uplifting way that maybe, just maybe, allows the character to both be happy and to live?

Because queer characters deserve that. Castiel deserved that.


	2. Chapter 2

Thus ends the longest-running live-action sci-fi show in American history.

A man tells another man—his best friend—that he loves him.

This man had only ever been depicted in sexual situations with women, so this was him coming out as queer.

He immediately dies, sent to a realm where he’ll be “dreaming about [his] regrets. Forever.”

Within two episodes, the other man is also dead, impaled from behind on a metal phallus, but not before the camera had been very deliberate in showing that he finally had a chance at freedom and happiness.

The first man is never seen again.

His so-called family can't really be bothered to care much that he's gone. Because that isn't especially dubious in the case of queer characters or anything.

The confession is also never spoken of again.

A third character utters two words about the first man. The second man has no verbal reaction. He is more interested in driving a car around.

Credits.

March, homophobia.


End file.
